Take This Bread

I am adjusting to my new life and beginning to find simple pleasures as I step into my invisible role. That was why being a waitress was so very hard for me way back in the beginning, the being invisible part. I don’t need constant attention, but everyone wants to be seen, to be heard, to have a voice and to matter. It set me on a journey of making sure people around me are seen and loved and honored. Waitresses don’t matter. But yet we are so vitally important. I laugh at the poor schmucks who are rude to me. If they only knew how intricately I control the meal they are so anxious to receive and I control their happiness in those moments they are treating me less than; all those quiet moments I spend alone with their soup spoon. Just yesterday I watched Carla the chain smoker with greasy bangs take a handful of fries from a burger platter seconds before it went out to the floor. This week, I took soup back to the chef declaring it cold. He stuck his finger in it, agreed and threw it in the microwave. Trust me, your food is prepared with the greatest of cynicism and don’t make me lick your spoon.

Yesterday I pulled this book from the shelf and today I read these words:

Other, deeper lessons of restaurant work stayed with me, informing not just my kitchen technique but the way I moved in the world. I learned what it felt like to become invisible; When I pulled on my slightly starch-stiff whites, the uniform changed me from an individual, with my own tedious history, to a ritual figure, one of millions of restaurant workers, with a time-honored predictable role. I’d learn the same thing again as a reporter: In the middle of a riot or a battle or a government press conference, a woman with a notebook and a pen and a determined look can go anywhere. I’d even remember it years later in church, when I’d slip on a cassock and lose my identity as a civilian: Wearing robes and a purposeful attitude, I could stride though a hushed congregation without attracting the slightest attention.

But the pleasure of hiding in plain sight was just one of the benefits I pick up from working as a cook I learned solidarity, the kind that only comes through shared bodily experience, sweating and lifting and hauling side by side with others. I learned from watching customers that the rituals of even the plainest or most cynically prepared dinner could carry unconscious messages of love and comfort. And at the end of a rush, when I sat down with the kitchen staff and waiters, I learned how central food is to creating human community, what eating together around a table can do. As a wise bishop would tell me, years and years later, in words I couldn’t possibly have grasped back then. “There’s a hunger beyond food that’s expressed in food, and that’s why feeding is always a kind of miracle.” – Take This Bread, Sara Miles